Sam Newman's Blog, page 3

Magpie Talkshow Episode 9 - Troy Hunt

In a change to the normal schedule, rather than releasing episodes in the strict order in which they were recorded I've instead brought forward one of my most recent interviews. In Episode 9 of the Magpie Talkshow, I talk to security consultant, blogger and pluralsught author Troy Hunt.

In the interview, recorded at Yow 2015, Troy and I discuss a number of security breaches, including the recent VTech hacking incident which happened in late 2015. Given the recency of the events we covered, I thought it made sense to pull this episode forward.

Troy discusses his involvement with the VTech situation, as well as his work with Have I Been Pwned? A site which helps you understand if your information may have been compromised in a data breach. Along the way we find time to discuss including ethical hacking, how not to store passwords, why a pineapple might be a hackers best friend and the success he's been having with Pluralsight.

Troy's Yow talk isn't yet available, but you can see an earlier version of his "Making hacking child's play" video from NDC Oslo below:

Making Hacking Child’s Play - Troy Hunt from NDC Conferences on Vimeo.

If you want to know more about what Troy is up to, then head over to his blog, follow him on Twitter, or perhaps take a look at his recent Pluralsight videos, especially the new Ethical Hacking series.

Magpie Talkshow Episode 8 - Beth Skurrie

In the second of two episodes released this week, I chat to Beth Skurrie.

Microservices have been a focus of mine for the last few years, and one of the trickiest problems in this area is how to ensure that when you change one service that you don't break other, collaborating services. While working as a consultant for Dius at REA in Australia, Beth helped create an internal project called Pact to help solve this problem. Now an open source project in its own right, Beth and I discuss what Pact is and the problems it solves.

We also found time to talk about why Ruby (and specifically Rails) might not be the right choice for that next giant code base, why we keep making the same mistakes over and over again, and even discover that Beth was one of the few people not using Logo to draw rude words during school programming classes.

You can follow Beth on Twitter @bethesque.

If you're interested in learning more, this video from Yow 2014 gives a great overview of how REA moved to microservices and the role that Pact played.

I'll be taking a break over Christmas, but you can expect weekly episodes to start again as of the 6th of January!

Magpie Talkshow Episode 7 - Brian Sletten

I was tied up with work an unable to get an episode up last week, so to make up for it you'll be getting not one, but two episodes!

In the first of this week's episodes, I chat to Brian Sletten. Brian has long been passionate about the semantic web, and I was fortunate enough to catch up with him at UberConf 2015 in Denver, Colorado. We talk about why the early promise of the semantic web didn't materialise at the time (and why it now may be coming into it's own), how XML is a terrible way to view graphs, why microformats never caught on, and even find time to talk about encryption too.

You can follow Brian on Twitter as @bsletten, and get links to some of his previous talks here. Brian also talked about JSON-LD, which is definately worth a look, and he also recently did a webinar about it too.

Brian recently published a series of DevWorks articles on the semntic web if you're interested in exploring some of his ideas further:

RDF
Querying RDF data with SPARQL
Linked Data
The Linked Data Platform
Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration

Finally, he recently published a piece with O'Reilly on the topic - Caring Doesn't Scale.

Magpie Talkshow Episode 6 - Simon Brown

is a freelance author, consultant and trainer based on Jersey in the channel islands. I've known Simon for a while, and we caught up at Devoxx Poland earlier this year.

Simon's focus for the last few years has been on helping people articulate their architectures, and come up with sensible abstractions to make it easy to share them. This is represented in his work on the C4 Model, in his book Software Architecture For Developers, and his new Structurizr venture, an online tool to help you generate and roundtrip architecture diagrams from code.

Aside from talking about architecture diagrams, we also talk a little about Jersey, self-publshing books, and manage to not mention Bergerac once. Oops!

Since we spoke, Simon has also started work on another book, The Art Of Visualising Software Architecture.

Magpie Talkshow Episode 5 - David Pollak

David Pollack it turns out has done many things. Like many of us, he was born before the internet existed. That said not many of us saw the internet being built at the ripe old age of 14! Since then he created the Lift framework for Scala, discovered Clojure, and can now be seen playing with Docker.

In one of the longer episodes so far, our conversation also takes in tattoos, types, docker security, and why minecraft might be the spectrum or commodore 64 of the 21st century. Trust me, it makes more sense when you listen to it���

You can find out more about what David's up to at his blog, and you can follow him as @dpp on Twitter. His talk on Docker and Weave at Devoxx Poland is now online (although you'll need to register for a free Parleys account).

By the way, the Docker and Security talk I mention during the interview was by Jen Andre at Velocity 2015, and was titled "Operating Docker securely for fun and profit". You can find her slides online, and access the talk on the Safari Bookshelf (subscription required, although you can get a free 30 day one pretty easily if you want).

Next week, we'll be hearing from Simon Brown who was the second person I interviewed during Devoxx Poland.

Backends For Frontends - A Microservice Pattern

Picture source, license

One of the questions that comes up a lot is how do microservices work with user interfaces. Microservice architectures lead to highly decomposed systems, but user interfaces are fundamentally aggregations of functionality. So how do those two things work together? I covered some patterns around how ot handle this in the book, but it's been an area which I wanted to explore more fully. The first outcome of this research is one of my longest pattern writeups so far, Backends For Frontends.

This is a pattern which I've seen used at a number of organisations. It resolves the challenge around aggregating calls for mobile devices, and solves issues with Web UIs and other external users of your services, all while helping to sidestep the problems associated with having one big API backend. I hope to write up some more UI-related microservice patterns over the coming months. In the meantime, if you want to know more, read the pattern writeup - and feel free to leave some feedback!

Magpie Talkshow Episode 4 - Irina Guberman

Some people love their job, and Irina is clearly one of them. Coming into computing via a somewhat unconventional route, Irina spent a long time with Java before discovering Erlang, which as you can tell from our discussion is something of a passion of hers! In this episode of The Magpie Talkshow we talk about What caused her to switch from Java to Erlang, whether or not Elixir could be the killer app for Erlang, and why you should always let kids play with robots.

Regarding Elixir, we talk towards the end of the interview about good books to read on the subject. Irina mentioned afterwards that she would recommend starting with Programming Elixir by Dave Thomas, and perhaps following that up with Metaprogramming Elixir by Chris McCord.

You can follow Irina on Twitter at @irina_guberman. She was also speaking at City Code Chicago recently - the video should be available soon. for details. If you can't wait for that, her talk from NDC Oslo "Maximizing throughput on Multicore Systems" is already available online.

This is the last of the interviews I did at NDC Oslo. Next week I'll be talking to creator of the Lift framework for Scala, David Pollak, who I interviewed at Devoxx Poland.

Building Microservices Translation Update

When I wrote Building Microservices, my hope was that people would read it. I had pretty modest targets for how many of you would decide to, but it's fair to say that they have been exceeded a fair while back. Something I honestly never considered was that it would end up getting translated, but it turns out more than a few local publishers thought it was a good idea to do exactly that.

It turns out that the book is already available in Polish and German. I can't say I care for the German cover, but picking hairs over a translation you thought would never happen seems a bit rich. Aside from those two though, there are at least five other translations in the works:

Chinese Complex - June 16 2016
Chinese Simplified - ETA TBC
Japanese - Feb 16th 2016
Korean - March 16th 2016
Russian - ETA TBC

Please take all ETAs above with a pinch of salt! I'll also make sure to keep the book page up to date with the latest information on the translations as I get it.

Podcasting on the go...

A few people have asked me what I use to record the podcast so I thought I'd share that here. I suspect there is a lot of options out there that would do as well (and many better) - this just worked for me as a newbie to podcasting and audio editing! It's also based on a work-flow of doing as much as possible 'out in the field' - I've tried to come up with a really portable solution that I can fly with easily and carry around all day if needed.

All of the said equipment and tooling is likely way more powerful than I need, and allows me to shoot myself in the foot on a regular basis. It's just like programming in Scala. That said, 15 or so interviews in, it's a setup that's working well for me.

Recorder

I use a Zoom H4n, which is pretty great. The main downside is that it takes an age to boot up. Aside from that it can capture sound from multiple inputs (see below), makes the recording process itself super simple, and is pretty compact. It also has it's own on-board microphones which I've used in other situations, but not for these interviews. It's capable of recording multiple tracks at up to 24 bits, allowing me to mix individual tracks separately (e.g. me and the interviewee), and the high quality level gives me more room to play with if I need to clean up audio.

Why use a portable field recorder? The alternative is attaching microphones to my computer, which while doable takes longer to setup and is significantly more bulky.

If I was buying a recorder now I'd get the H5 which can be had for only a small amount more but has new pre-amps, a pluggable microphone setup and much better physical UI.

Microphones

I've gone for a couple of Audio Technica ATR3350 lavalier microphones, which are stupidly cheap for how good they are. They do have a few downsides though. Firstly, they use an external battery pack that has no light to show when it's turned on (meaning I've forgotten to turn them off more than once). Secondly, they have no low battery indicator, meaning you're always worried that they will just fail mid-recording session. Finally, the cable they come with is crazy long. For the price, it's hard to do better though!

Arguably, these are the weak link in the chain, primarily because of the lack of XLR connectors and need for external power.

Wiring It All Up

The Zoom has two ways of taking audio input. Either a stereo 3.5mm line in, or one of two mono XLR jacks. The problem is that I have two microphones with 3.5mm connectors. So how do I make that work? I connect one to the 3.5mm line in, and use a Rode converter to plug the 3.5mm microphone into one of the XLR jack. Then when recording I have one track for me, one for the interviewee.

Normally, I connect the interviewee's microphone to the stereo input - I lose a lot going via the XLR converter so I have to up the recording levels for that microphone - this results in a noisier recording than I would like, but it works. The idea is that if I have substandard audio it should be mine, as you'll be hearing my voice the least!

The Zoom is capable of powering microphones via the XLR connectors (called Phantom power). With the right microphones this means you don't need any external power source, making for a more compact recording rig. XLR microphones tend to be more expensive though, although with that normally comes higher quality too. It's worth noting that I explicitly turn phantom power off when plugging my current microphones in as I want to avoid frying the audio technicas - they aren't designed to take any power other than their attached battery pack!

Editing

I take the individual tracks from the Zoom, and mix them into the final product using Adobe Audition. Having separate tracks is surprisingly useful in doing the very minor amount of audio cleanup I do. I mostly leave the background noises - I'll just duck out the odd loud noise, but want to leave things mostly 'normal' sounding. I upload to SoundCloud which in turn powers the iTunes feed. I have a template I reuse so this is pretty quick - that said I'd imagine I spend around an hour per 30min episode editing everything together and recording intros and outros.

Magpie Talkshow Episode 3 - Neal Ford

In the 3rd of my 4 interviews at NDC Oslo, I talk to ThoughtWorks colleague and fellow Technical Radar author Neal Ford. Neal talks about his journey into computing, the uneven distribution of holographic politicians, indoor plumbing, and functional thinking. Perhaps not in that order.

You can find out more about Neal Ford over at his website, or follow him on twitter @neal4d. The latest version of the ThoughtWorks Tech Radar we mention on the podcast was launched this week.